A Hunger Like No Other (Immortals After Dark #2)(2)

The human males she passed turned their heads slowly to regard her, frowns in place, sensing something, but unsure. Probably some genetic memory from long ago that signaled her as their wildest fantasy or their darkest nightmare.

Emma was neither.

She was a co-ed—a recent Tulane grad—alone in Paris and hungry. Weary from another failed search for blood, she sank onto a rustic bench beneath a chestnut tree, eyes riveted to a waitress drawing espresso at a café. If only blood poured so easily, Emma thought. Yes, if it came warm and rich from a bottomless tap, then her stomach wouldn’t be clenched in hunger at the mere idea.

Starving in Paris. And friendless. Was there ever such a predicament?

Couples strolling hand in hand along the gravel walk seemed to mock her loneliness. Was it just her, or did lovers look more adoringly at each other in this city? Especially in the springtime. Die, bastards.

She sighed. It wasn’t their fault that they were bastards who should die.

She’d been spurred to enter this fray by the prospect of her echoing hotel room and the idea that she might find another blood pusher in the City of Light. Her former hookup had gone south—literally—fleeing Paris for Ibiza. He’d given little explanation for abandoning his job, saying only that with the “arrival of the risen king,” some “serious epic shit” was brewing in “gay Paree.” Whatever that meant.

As a vampire, she was a member of the Lore, that stratum of beings who’d convinced humans they existed only in imagination. Yet though the Lore was thick here, Emma had been unable to replace her pusher. Any creatures she could scout out to ask fled her solely because she was a vampire. They scurried without knowing that she wasn’t even a full-blooded one, nor that Emma was a wuss who’d never bitten another living being. As her fierce adoptive aunts loved to tell everyone, “Emma cries her pink tears if she dusts a moth’s wings.”

Emma had accomplished nothing during this trip that she’d insisted on taking. Her quest to uncover information about her deceased parents—her Valkyrie mother and her unknown vampire father—was a failure. A failure that would culminate in a call to her aunts to get them to retrieve her. Because she couldn’t feed herself. Pitiful. She sighed. She’d be razzed about this for another seventy years—

She heard a crash, and before she even had time to feel bad for the waitress getting docked, another crash and then another followed. She tilted her head in curiosity—just as a table umbrella across the walk shot fifteen feet up to be batted high in the sky, fluttering all the way to the Seine. A cruise boat honked and Gallic curses erupted.

Half-lit by the walk’s torchlights, a towering man turned over café tables, artists’ easels, and book stands selling century-old pornography. Tourists screamed and fled in the wake of destruction. Emma shot to her feet with a gasp, looping her satchel over her shoulder.

He was cutting a path directly to her, his black trench coat trailing behind him. His size and his unnaturally fluid movements made her wonder if he could possibly be human. His hair was thick and long, concealing half his face, and several days’ growth of beard shadowed his jaw.

He pointed a shaking hand at her. “You,” he growled.

She jerked glances over both of her shoulders looking for the unfortunate you he was addressing. Her. Holy shite, this madman had settled on her.

He turned his palm up and beckoned her to come to him—as if he was confident she would.

“Uh, I-I don’t know you,” she squeaked, trying to back up, but her legs immediately met the bench.

He continued stalking her, ignoring the tables between them, tossing them aside like toys instead of varying his direct pursuit of her. Furious intent burned in his pale blue eyes. She could sense his rage more sharply as he neared, unsettling her, because her kind were considered the predators in the night—never the prey. And because, at heart, she was a coward.

“Come.” He bit out the word as though with difficulty and motioned for her again.

Eyes wide, she shook her head, then leapt backward over the bench, twisting in the air. She landed facing away from him and began speeding down the quay. She was weak, more than two days without blood, but terror made her quick as she crossed the Archevêché Bridge to exit the island.

Three…four blocks covered. She chanced a look behind her. Didn’t see him. Had she lost him—? Sudden glaring music from her purse made her cry out.

Who in the hell had programmed the Crazy Frog ring tone into her cell phone? Her eyes narrowed. Aunt Regin. The world’s most immature immortal, who looked like a siren and behaved like a frat pledge.

Cell phones in their coven were for dire emergency only. Ringers would disturb their hunting in the back alleys of New Orleans, and even a vibration would be enough to trigger a twitching ear in a low creature.

She flipped it open. Speak of the devil: Regin the Radiant.

“Little busy right now,” Emma snapped, taking another peek over her shoulder.

“Drop your things. Don’t take time to pack. Annika wants you at the executive airport immediately. You’re in danger.”

“Duh.”

Click. That wasn’t a warning—that was narration.

She’d ask the details once she was on the plane. As if she’d needed a reason to return home. Just the mention of danger and she would scamper back to her coven, to her Valkyrie aunts who would kill anything that threatened her and keep malice at bay.